Imagine three boys, one girl, ages three through 11, wearing old clothes and boots and carrying buckets. They trudge with their father across a mudflat, digging lugworms that may end up in a university lab for dissection or be studied as part of a collection of specimens from a mudflat. The children struggle to lift one boot from the sucking mud, then the other, then sink again. Suddenly, the three-year-old falls forward, right out of his boots, face into the mud.
“Then we have to go home and clean up,” says their father, Tim Sheehan, laughing as he describes these collecting expeditions and how his youngest son hasn’t quite mastered using his toes to stay in his boots.
Sheehan often takes his children out to help fill orders for his business, Gulf of Maine Marine Life Supply Company, located in Pembroke. The business, which has 10 full-time employees, provides live and preserved marine specimens, both single species and collections that are used in universities and other schools and research programs throughout the United States. It also ships complete tide-pool touch-tank collections with educational materials to help teachers plan activities based on the study of marine life.
Always a teacher at heart — he taught high school science for seven years — Sheehan especially enjoys sending his company’s tide-pool kits to schools. The morning he talked on the phone about his business, he had collected specimens including hermit crabs, clams, sandworms and sea stars to be packaged and shipped that day.
“Teachers love the kits,” he says. “Often the entire student body of a school will make trips to the classroom to see them, and some schools have parents’ nights where little brothers and sisters can come, too.” Kits have traveled as far as Colorado. A teacher there wrote later that “the joy on the faces of the kids as they touched and handled [the specimens] could not be duplicated!” (She also added that the sand worms were “the most gross creatures” she’d ever seen.)
Sheehan’s business is as varied as the life in Cobscook Bay, where most of the specimens come from. One day he will send green crabs to research facilities in British Columbia and Newfoundland; another day he’ll obtain anemones, kelp plants and other marine life when fish aquaculture cages are brought ashore for cleaning. He will occasionally fill an order for a dogfish shark or two. He has developed a special way to collect and dry Maine sea stars so they retain their shape and are useful for decorating. “I’m a bit of a junk man,” he says. “I enjoy finding new uses for the natural resources in our area, new ways to add value to them.”
Some of Gulf of Maine Marine Life Supply’s largest shipments are made up of marine collections ordered by universities across the country for use in their science programs. These include rocky shore and sandy shore ecology lab collections and embryology and life history and marine phylum assortments. Sheehan also provides plankton tows and seawater samples, aquarium supplies and field guides.
At 39, Sheehan has consolidated a broad assortment of educational, entrepreneurial and practical on-the-water experience in this venture, which he started part-time, and increased to full-time with a partner three years later. The partner has since moved on to different work, but Sheehan remains enthusiastic about the business and sees many ways to make it grow.
Like his children, Sheehan’s work skills were honed at an early age, when he and his brothers helped out on the family farm in Patten. “My parents were back-to-the-landers from Michigan and Vermont,” he says. “We raised everything we ate except the salt on the table and the wheat to make the bread. We had home grown pork, lamb and beef, and we fished for trout, picked fiddleheads and berries, made cheese and wine. My four brothers and I were the big labor force.”
He and his brothers made and sold wreaths, and ran a farm stand with extra vegetables from the huge family gardens. Their parents raised sheep and gave each of the boys one ewe to take care of. When the ewes had lambs, they were able to make a little money. “That was a first capitalist venture for us,” Sheehan says.
At age eight, Sheehan developed another profitable side business, digging night crawlers and selling them to fishermen heading up Route 11. “I made this roadside container and at night I would fill it with night crawlers and leave it with a note to put the money in the can,” he says. “In the morning, I’d go back and find between 30 and 40 dollars. I made $1,000 in a season.”
Sheehan’s father was a science teacher. “He taught us all about the natural world,” Sheehan says. “He was always turning over rocks, naming things with their scientific and common names. I do the same thing now with my kids.”
In 1989 Sheehan completed a BS at University of Maine at Orono, majoring in biology. He spent a post-grad semester in England, then returned to the U.S. to embark on a series of jobs, including work at a ski resort out West and for an environmental toxicology company in Florida that measured the level of pesticides accumulated in trapped birds’ blood. Each summer, he held several jobs in the Bar Harbor area, including painting houses and waiting tables.
When he and his wife, Amy, moved to Pembroke in 1994, both taught at Woodland High School in Baileyville. He used summer vacations to study for his Maine Guide’s License, then the Master Guide License and a Captain’s License. Later, he and Amy developed Tidal Trails Eco Tours, which offered activities on Cobscook Bay like deep-sea fishing and sea kayaking, whale watching and bird watching, and even took film crews on the water. “Because I’m a science teacher and a Maine Guide, I was able to give customers a real eco-tour,” he says. “I could educate them about tidal currents and the life cycles of the birds and marine life.”
Tidal Trails was very popular — people still call and beg him to take them out — but two months’ work wasn’t enough to support the family. (He had resigned from teaching to devote more time to the business.) He filled in the gaps with adjunct teaching, running courses to help other people study for their Maine Guide license, and off-season architectural salvage work.
The architectural salvage work was too backbreaking to continue for long; he needed to come up with something else. “With Tidal Trails, I’d become more and more involved with the marine community of Cobscook Bay,” he says. “I’d joined the Cobscook Bay Fishermen’s Association, learned about aquaculture and shellfish research in the bay, learned a lot from local people. And all along, I’d been studying on my own and adding to my marine science library. I knew there had to be a way to put all this together.
“I’d been a teacher, and I’d ordered marine specimens and supplies for my science classroom. Here I was living in an area with all this marine life; I was sure professors and researchers needed it. I managed to hook up with different educational companies that deal with scientific supplies, everything from grass to sow bugs, different kinds of rocks to all kinds of marine life. They’d need things like 500 specimens of a particular sea star, or 10 pounds of sea lettuce.”
He emphasizes that his business is grounded in sustainability, that he would never collect or buy any rare or endangered species, that he has obtained all the permits required by the Maine Department of Marine Resources and reports to them regularly. He collects a small number of each species compared to commercial fisheries.
Sheehan hopes to expand the tide pool kits market in the near future. He also plans to set up a boat he owns as a scientific sampling vessel for his company’s use, and for other types of research like environmental sampling for aquaculture companies and whatever else comes along.
He dreams of establishing a marine educational facility, perhaps modeled on the Chewonki Foundation. He wants every kid to have the curiosity of his children who, he says, take after their grandfather. “They’re always digging in the mud, turning over stones, wading out with buckets and nets, putting on headlamps so they can explore after dark,” he says. Such interest, he believes, will lead young people to value the world’s ocean life and inspire them to take better care of the environment.
For further information, visit www.gulfofme.com.